I joined vistaheads.com, a resource for Microsoft Vista where members have access to MS Vista (and other Windows platform) tips, tricks, and information, and babycenter.com, a community for pregnancy and parenting information.
The main social capital mechanisms implemented in the vistaheads.com community are the buddy list and group membership.
Members are able to add users to their buddy list where they are able to see when their buddies are online and can send them private messages. Members are able to send private messages to several people on their buddy list at the same time as with sending announcements. The page that allows members to add buddies, has a link to the vistaheads.com members list that contains all the members in the community. The members list allows you to view a user’s profile.
The second social capital mechanism is the group membership, which allows community members to identify their professional group membership. For instance members can join the “Microsoft Most Valuable Professional” group to let vistaheads.com users know that they are a “Microsoft Most Valuable Professional”. This mechanism not only brings Microsoft MVP’s together but also helps to connect other professionals with Microsoft MVP’s.
The main social capital mechanisms in the babycenter.com community are the “my friends” list, groups, photo clubs, and “people”. As with the vistaheads.com community, members are able to add other members to their friends list and view their friend’s activities such as comments made. Unlike the vistaheads.com community, members are not able to see when their friends are online. Joining a group allows members to add posts and comments to threads within the group. Joining a photo club allows members to upload photos to different topics such as “baby’s first photos” and “pregnant bellies”. The “people” mechanism allows members to see which members have something in common with you, who the new members are, and which members are online.
The main trust mechanism in both vistaheads.com and babyceter.com is the profile that allows users to upload a personal image and personal information like your email address, area where you live, and a brief description. The other trust mechanisms in the vistaheads.com is the user’s “reputation” rating based on how many useful contributions you have made to the site and your thread ratings. The higher a user’s reputation and thread ratings, the more trust you have for that user.
One interesting trust mechanism implemented in the babycenter.com community is the ability of members to view the journals of other members. In these journals, members write about their personal thought and feelings about pregnancy and parenting. From these journals we are able to get a better idea of the thoughts and ideas of other members.
I found it more difficult to acquire social capital with the vistaheads.com than the babycenter.com community. In the vistaheads.com community, I posted a thread on the “Introduce Yourself” forum and posted a few questions. However, they have not received any replies as of Sunday 3/1/2009. I did notice that my questions were already asked on earlier threads.
In the babycenter.com site, I received two welcome notes from two of the site monitors. After posting a thread to the “Meet and Greet” forum, I received one friend invitation. I posted two questions, and a day after my post they received several comments. I was able to gain helpful information and emotional support from my interactions in the babycenter.com community.
With improving the vistaheads.com role/capital/trust mechanisms, the only improvement that I could think of is with the “Group Memberships” mechanism. This mechanism is one that does not seem to have much importance. There is only one group listed and does not have many members. According to the Williams article, “bridging may broaden social horizons or world views, or open up opportunities for information or new resources.” By placing more emphasis on “Group Memberships”, vistaheads.com may see an increase in more useful posts and comments. By including other groups like “system administrators”, “IT professionals”, “windows home users”, “application development”, etc. the vistaheads.com community will incorporate a larger portions of members to join groups, possibly encouraging them to share more information with other users.
With improving the babycenter.com role/capital/trust mechanisms, I thought that it would be nice to have a few pediatricians or nurses as site monitors and to explicitly identify themselves as pediatricians or nurses. This is not identified in the reading, but would help to increase trust in the community itself. The Massa, Allen et al., and Erylimaz et al. articles investigated the trust among users, but trust in the site itself could possibly increase a site’s integrity.
Ideas for Final Project:
I would like to investigate how social norms are established and how they can help site monitors to identify trolls, trolling, and invalid information.
How are social norms established in social network sites?
How can social norms help to identify trolls, trolling, and invalid information?
I wonder sometimes at the relative speed of response in different forums. Some forums are much more socially active and social capital can be built relatively quickly. Others seem to take a lot longer to build relationships and social capital. This, I think, can impact building trust and reputation. Why is it, though, that the community babycenter.com reacted (from what I gather) more quickly to your presence than did the vistaheads community? I did like your suggestion of increasing the role of group membership on vistaheads.com. One can still "bridge" across groups and across the entire forum, but within a smaller subsection there may be more opportunity for "bonding."
ReplyDeleteA comment on your project proposal. If a website has to rely on site monitors to identify trolling and invalid information, this website is clearly not scalable. A few human admins could only work so many hours. One potential solution is to give high reputations users the same rights as site monitors. I described one such example in my blog for this assignment.
ReplyDeleteFor your project, what SNSs do you have in mind? Are you going to investigate the lesser known players on the Internet, like greatboyfriends.com? (Mike told me that the website only has about two thousand or so members.) The inverse of your question could also help with your investigation: what mechanisms do not allow for social norms to be established on SNSs? Or what mechanisms allow for trolling to take place, or invalid information to spread? Just some questions I thought could help you further your project proposal... :)
ReplyDeleteAs for your blog post, I also agree that having specialized groups on websites like vistaheads.com would make people want to share information with others because people could identify with the groups of which they are a part and would feel that they are a part of something; however, if a person is part of a large, heterogeneous group, it would make that person feel that he or she is just another member and thus would not be motivated to contribute the vast knowledge he or she may have.
Tomjenni,
ReplyDeleteI think that some sites do have a faster response time to different questions and types of questions. I believe that the more the question is geared for the purpose of the site the more likely you are to get a quick response.
I like your idea. If you could establish how trolling starts you could probably automate the process, eliminating the need for monitors or at least reducing them. It would surprise me if the off-the-shelf software doesn't provide some such functionality. Maybe, you could contact the sites and see if they implement monitor automation and how it is implemented.
The sites you chose seem to have double trust considerations. You mentioned that users can develop trust for other users by reading profiles, but their first has to be trust for the site in order to divulge such telling information as the area in which one lives and, gasp, post an email address.
ReplyDeleteI also chose a site related to pregnancy and parenting. I too found that this type of community is eager to welcome and help others.
I like you final project idea. The establishment of social norms is the foundation of SNS and yet quality discussion of it has been missing from our readings. Though, it seems difficult to determine unless you are able to interview people who are in the process of creating a SNS.
I know we've already covered motivation factors for online communities but I still wonder what drives people to contribute to a site like vistaheads.com. Considering it focuses on commercial products already supported by a company that provides forums and technical self-help sites. Personally, when I search for solutions to technical issues, I look for answers across different forums to check for solutions that seem plausible and not worry so much of the reputation of a user. Maybe users posting content are also filtering what to answer? If questions have already been answered like you mentioned, few will bother to reply a second time?
ReplyDeleteThe topic you suggested seems challenging. It sounds like an extension of one of the studies that was covered in a previous article that discussed identifying non-explicit roles in wikipedia. You could probably identify interesting ways to collect data around how social communities evolve social norms and deal with trolling/invalid data.
Good luck.
I don't have experience with these websites but I think serving different target users might cause the different feelings to help and cooperate with other users. It seems that babycenter.com users aim for higher group achievement and co-operation compare to vistaheads.com users.
ReplyDeleteJust wondering, you mentioned that the babycenter.com allow users to read other user's journals. What is the main place where these are posted? Threads or different places?